Interracial Relationships and the “Brown Baby Question”: Black GIs, White British Women and their Mixed Race Offspring in World War II

Authors

  • Lucy Bland Professor Department of Humanities and Social Sciences Anglia Ruskin University

Abstract

When GIs arrived in Britain in 1942 in preparation for an invasion of France, amongst their number were over 130,000 African Americans. Many British women formed relationships with these black GIs, resulting in the birth of 1,700 to 2,000 babies. Despie racial prejudice and stigma, approximately half or more of the mothers kept their babies. The African-American press named these children "brown babies." To the African-Amerian newspaper Pittsburgh Courier "the enitre 'brown baby' question is one of the most controversial subjects in this country [USA] today. It is a question that involves two great nations - the United States of America and Great Britain." The nature of this "controversial subject" is the focus of this article - a subject that has received little historical attention but at the time filled the pages of the press both sides of the Atlantic.

Author Biography

  • Lucy Bland, Professor Department of Humanities and Social Sciences Anglia Ruskin University

    Lucy Bland is Professor of Social and Cultural History at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge. She has written widely on the history of feminism, gender and sexuality, including Banishing the Beast: English Feminism and Sexual Morality, 1885-1914 (1995, 2nd edition, 2002), two books with Laura Doan: Sexology in Culture: Labelling Bodies and Desires and Sexology Uncensored: the Documents of Sexual Science (both 1998) and Modern Women on Trial: Sexual Transgression in the Age of the Flapper (2013).  She is currently writing a book provisionally entitled Britain’s “Brown Babies”: the Offspring of Black GIs and British Women born in World War 11.

Published

2018-02-01

Issue

Vol. 26 No. 3 (2017)

Section

Studies